Monday, 24 August 2015

Mendelssohn’s Debt to Nature

Arthur Rackham's 'Puck'

I
have always regarded Felix Mendelssohn as being an honorary British composer.
Other names that fall into this category include Handel (of course), Ignaz
Moscheles, Clementi and J.C. Bach. I do not deny their nationalities, but
remark that they spent much time in the United Kingdom.Furthermore, I have always felt that William
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
was actually set in the Forest of Arden (or the home park of a great estate) rather than a wood near Athens. This
born out by the names of the rustics, the legendary nature of Puck and the flora
and fauna the playwright mentions. Add to this the fact that Mendelssohn’s incidental
music for the play is one of the most ‘English’ creations in the composer’s catalogue
and I have a great excuse for printing this short anecdote from Anecdotes of Great Musicians by W.
Francis Gates (London, Weekes & Co, 1896). It is one of my favourite books.

I
do not answer for the absolute
historicity of the story: it seems a nice idea.

‘Many
a composer has been indebted to some sound or tone in nature for the suggestion
of musical ideas. Nature suggests and man elaborates the melody, though some writers
would have us believe that the composer is simply the amanuensis of nature, in many
cases. But we must remember that music is art, and that nature supplies nature,
not art.

A
good composer will turn to account a suggestion from any source, however humble.
Mendelssohn took pleasure in acknowledging his debt to nature in these matters.
While Mendelssohn was not a Beethoven, while he could not so well depict the rugged,
the grand, the heroic, as did that musical Jupiter, yet Mendelssohn was the tone
poet of the forest and field, the bright sun, and the blue sky. A friend of his
relates how they were walking in the country one day, and getting tired, threw themselves
on the grass in the shade and were there pursuing their conversation. Suddenly
Mendelssohn seized him by the arm and whispered, "Hush!" A moment later
the composer told him that a large fly had just then gone buzzing by and he
wished to hear its sound die away in the distance.

Mendelssohn
was at that time working on his overture to A
Midsummer Night's Dream, and not long after, it was completed. He then showed
his friend a certain descending bass modulation with the remark, "There, that's
the fly that buzzed past us at Schönhausen."[1]

[1] Schönhausen is a
city in the district of Stendal in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany.

About Me

I am well over fifty years old: the end of the run of baby boomers! I was born in Glasgow, moving south to York in the late ‘seventies. I now work in London.
My main interest is British Music from the nineteenth century onwards.
I love the ‘arch-typical’ English countryside – and have always wanted to ‘Go West, Boy’.
A. E. Housman and the ‘Georgian’ poets are a huge influence on my aesthetic. I have spent much of my life looking for the ‘Land of Lost Content’ and only occasionally glimpsed it…somewhere in…???
My recently published work includes essays on Ivor Gurney’s song ‘On Wenlock Edge’ for the Gurney Society Journal, The Music of Marion Scott and a study of Janet Hamilton’s songs for the British Music Society Journal, and the composer Muriel Herbert for the Housman Society.
I have contributed to the journals of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, the Finzi Society, and the Bliss Society, the Berkeley Society, the BMS Newsletter and regular CD reviews for MusicWeb International.